12/17/2021 Photo credit: Valerie Kathawala Wines with a View at Winkler-Hermaden By Jill Barth The story of Weingut Winkler-Hermaden and its home in a striking 11th-century castle starts with a “small, tough” woman. That woman, Magdalene Helene, was current proprietor Georg Winkler-Hermaden’s grandmother. When he found her diary, which she kept from her arrival at the Schloss Kapfenstein in 1916 through WWII, he “began to read and couldn’t stop until the book was finished.” In 1916, Magdalene Helene came to the castle as a young woman to work as a maid. Just two years later, her employer died and…
Jill Barth is a writer focused on wine creators–with culture, community, ecology, and travel pivotal to the stories. She’s a columnist for Forbes and USA Today. Her work appears in Wine Enthusiast, Decanter, VinePair, Relais & Châteaux Instants Magazine, SevenFifty Daily, and more. She’s a Provence Wine Master through the Wine Scholar Guild and received a fellowship to the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers. She’s also a speaker, wine judge, and founder of l'occasion, an award-winning publication that honors the ways we drink, make, and contemplate wine.
Wine regions are threaded along the Danube, one after another, like a string of Chanel pearls. Wagram, Kamptal, Kremstal, Wachau. And Traisental — the only one that lies exclusively south of the Danube. Its namesake river, the Traisen, divides the valley as the Seine does Paris or the Gironde does Bordeaux, into left and right banks. The tiny region flaunts French finesse and cool avant-garde. But also a rustic, down-to-earth charm. In Paris, the Left Bank is the quartier of intellectuals and artists. Through Yves Saint Laurent it achieved world fame in fashion. Who or what sets the tone and…...
Shaping our wines is like sculpting: you start with a rock and you chisel out the sculpture,” Martin Nittnaus, 34, states confidently. The arts are never far away when you speak to the oldest son of winemakers Anita and Hans Nittnaus. Like his father, who dreamt of becoming a musician, Martin never planned on a life in wine. He went to university to study English literature and philosophy. But blood is thicker than water, and this year marked his sixth vintage working the plots his father gave to him and his brother, Andreas (Andi, 31). The Nittnaus estate is in Gols,…...
Trink Magazine | Austria's winegrowing region of Carnuntum has seemingly been there from the beginning with an identity forever in flux. Paula Redes Sidore explores how growers are redefining what regionality means, together.
In 2013, I moved to Austria and spent most of a year living in the small town of Eisenstadt. There were several cultural difficulties to surmount, not least the language. Despite my decent grasp of German, I found the Austrian dialect all but impenetrable for the first few months. And then there were the drinking customs. Because Austria had forged an impressive international reputation for elegant, high-quality wines, I expected to spend my time savoring delicious Blaufränkisch, or getting to know the top single-vineyard sites of the Wachau. But everywhere I went people just drank a mix of cheap white…...
